Driving tests confirm: Women really are worse at parking

File photo / Thinkstock

It is a question which has long been the source of domestic strife at the wheel - are women really worse at parking than men?

Sorry, ladies, official figures have revealed the truth: you are not very good at it.

Almost a third of the 170,000 women who failed their driving test in the UK last year for mistakes in reversing or failing to use their mirrors came unstuck on parallel parking.

And if those figures released by the British Driving Standards Agency are not enough to ensure a rare victory for men in the battle of the sexes, then they have the support of science as well.

Researchers at the Ruhr University Bochum, in Germany, who asked 65 volunteers to park a £23,000 Audi, found that women took up to 20 seconds longer than men.

Some women have blamed the problem on the fact their breasts make it more difficult to turn around while parking.

The agency has listed the top five faults by gender for those who failed.

The most frequent - forgetting to check right, left and then right again at junctions - was common to both sexes.

About 1.5 million drivers in the UK take the test each year. "So far this year the pass rate is 50.7 per cent for men and 44.1 per cent for women," said an agency spokesman.

Female drivers need an average 52 hours of tuition to pass but men speed through in just 36 hours of lessons.